The results of a study conducted by a team from the University of Groningen Medical Centre in the Netherlands show that watching porn will actually turn off the part of the brain that processes visual stimuli. At least in women.

The study looked at 12 healthy, heterosexual premenopausal women, all of whom were on hormonal birth control pills. While the researchers looked at the their brains using positron electro tomography (PET scans), the women were shown three different films: the first was a control about marine life in the Caribbean, the second two were so-called "female friendly" porn.

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Their results showed that far less blood was sent to the primary visual cortex, while the women were watching the most explicit porn. The same thing happens in the brain when a human conducts a non-visual task—like memorizing a list of words—while being shown some sort of visual "distractor" stimuli. Interestingly, when watching normal, non-smut films, extra blood is sent to the visual cortex. One of the members of the research team, uroneurologist Gert Holsteg, hypothesizes that the results indicate the brain is more focussed on sexual arousal, when watching porn, than on the actual visual processing of the film.